Improve your WordPress Site Performance

Are you using WordPress for your blogging site? If yes then you need to know certain things to improve the performance of your blog especially when you are hosting your blog on a shared hosting (low CPU and MySQL). When you use shared hosting the resources are shared and with other website causing a decrease in the performance of your website.

Today I will discuss about how you can easily increase the performance of your WordPress powered blog. Below are some key points which are mostly responsible for the performance of a website.

1. Caching of static files

2. Caching of DB queries

3. Compression Of your site (GZIP)

Caching of static files:

Static files like .html,.js,.css, image files etc. are cached so that whenever a visitor hits your browser, these files are loaded from the local cache, from browser cache, leads to reduce in http request and increase in performance.

Caching of DB queries:

This method caches the DB queries and keeps it in memory or disk. This reduces the load on the database and increases the performance of your website.

Compression Of your site (GZIP):

If you enable compression on your website all the requested contents are compressed and sent to the browser. This process reduces the bandwidth and page loading becomes faster.

Now the question is how do you achieve all the above features on your WordPress powered site? As a core feature WordPress provides the caching mechanism but it is disabled by default. If you enable this feature all the posts, pages will be cached and there is no option to have control over it.

There is a plugin called Hyper Cache which does the caching control and settings easier. For DB query caching there is an awesome plugin called DB Cache Reloaded Fix. For enabling compression you can login to your hosting panel and enable the compression, if your hosting server does not support the compression mechanism then what? No need to worry, Hyper Cache is there to fulfill this option too. Hyper Cache provides an option to enable compression of your content, if you enable this option with Hyper Cache, all your content will be delivered compressed. When you use the Hyper Cache in combination with the DB Cache Reloaded, you site performance will highly increase.

Let’s see some of the features of these plugins:

Hyper Cache:

Compatible with the plugin wp-pda which enables a blog to be accessible from mobile devices

Manages (both) plain and gzip compressed pages

Auto clean system to reduce the disk usage

404 caching

Redirects caching

Easy to configure

Global Translator compatibility

Last Modified http header compatibility with 304 responses

Compressed storage to reduce the disk space usage

Agents, urls and cookies based rejection configurable

Easy to integrated with other plugins

DB Cache Reloaded Fix:

This plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. It is much faster than other html caching plugins and uses less disk space for caching. Now compatible with WordPress 3.x.y

So use the Hyper Cache in combination with DB Cache Reloaded to increase the performance of your website.

+Ayodhyanath Guru holds a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering and has worked with various prestigious clients in the IT industry and presently working as a Software Engineer. He is a part time blogger and presently authors the Jafaloo.Com blog. Being a tech enthusiast Guru likes to surf the web and blogs about interesting technical topics like How-To guides, freewares, Tutorials, Software, Gadgets, web applications etc. Apart from blogging he likes coding in Java/J2EE and PHP.